


start the clock

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-22 23:15:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6097162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is why Ariadne gets invited to parties: she’s tiny and charming, and she’s always talking shit about herself like the only thing she’s got going for herself is her ‘underdog appeal.’ She’s also hilarious and gorgeous and sure of herself enough to be the first on the dance floor, and to dance alone until the rest of the party is ready to follow her lead. She’s so luminously interesting that she can turn any conversation with any lackluster neckbeard into a fascinating way to spend an hour. </p>
<p>This is why Yusuf gets invited to parties: because he has a car, and everyone knows Ariadne doesn’t like going to social events without him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	start the clock

This is why Ariadne gets invited to parties: she’s tiny and charming, and she’s always talking shit about herself like the only thing she’s got going for herself is her ‘underdog appeal.’ She’s also hilarious and gorgeous and sure of herself enough to be the first on the dance floor, and to dance alone until the rest of the party is ready to follow her lead. She’s so luminously interesting that she can turn any conversation with any lackluster neckbeard into a fascinating way to spend an hour. 

This is why Yusuf gets invited to parties: because he has a car, and everyone knows Ariadne doesn’t like going to social events without him. 

In early December, there was an invitation in his locker for, Yusuf is sure, a combination of the above two reasons. “Are you interested in this?” He asked Ari when they met for lunch, holding it between two finders. 

She took it from his hand. “I don't know that I've been invited to this,” she said, turning it over. 

“Oh, come off it,” he groused, poking her with his elbow. 

“True shit,” she said, grinning, “this is all you. Don't get me wrong. I want to be there, but I’ll be your plus one for this one.” 

The party is at Eames’ house, and he must have made the invitations, hand scribbled in his own handwriting, wonky and artistically uneven. Yusuf likes Eames okay, but his popularity makes him nervous. People like him for different reasons than people like Ari, but they seem to have the same near-universal approval ratings. 

*

Ariadne has a very casual relationship with punctuality. Like, maybe one time she had sex with it in the bathroom of a concert venue, and maybe she wouldn’t mind a second go at it, but on the whole she hopes to not run into it in public. 

“Please stop,” she says, her thumb at the corner of her eye, pulling it outward and keeping her eyelid taut while she carefully applies gold eyeliner to the edge of her eye with the other hand. “Your tension is making me nervous. I keep missing my waterline.”

“I’m not tense,” Yusuf says, looking up his book. He’s seated on the lip of her bathtub, thumbing through one of his favorites. In truth, he would like to go. It's not that he's eager to get there so much as he has this very private fantasy that one day, he and Ariadne will arrive at a party around the the time the invitation says they should arrive, and Ariadne will be bored of the party by ten PM, and they can be home by curfew.

Of course, Yusuf will have to take that secret with him to the grave, because if she knew, she would make it happen, and Yusuf is careful to love Ariadne like an anthropologist. He has no desire to compromise the structural integrity of her. 

“You’re super tense, which is why you’re reading like a snail.” 

Yusuf squints at the corner of the page. “I’ve read forty pages since you put on primer.”

“Which would be impressive,” she hums, mouth snapping shut as she returns her attention to her face. 

She doesn’t have to finish that sentence. Yusuf learned as a child prodigy that he was utterly undone by the praise of his mentors, but he didn’t learn until he was almost an adult that he should have paced himself early on. No one is ever impressed by forty pages now. 

“Anyways,” he says, feeling annoyed now, “I don’t care when we go.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, dragging the words out. She puts a hand in his hair, scratching at his scalp with the gentle scrape of her fingernails. He bats her away out of annoyance, not because it doesn’t feel exquisite. “I’m almost done here.” 

“ _ I. Don’t. Care. _ ” Yusuf bites out, and shit, now he definitely sounds bothered. 

*

This is what a party looks like at Eames’ house: somewhere there is music playing, loud enough to soak the entire house, There are beers floating in the pool, because it's cold enough in December to keep them icy, and Ariadne is wading through a throng of interchangeable faces. It's pretty universal. Yusuf finds the whole thing tedious, would never come if he didn't have a good reason. 

He does, though, and he remembers it every time Ariadne cranes her neck around to make sure she knows where he is. 

Something happened to her at a party her sophomore year, after he’d met her but before they’d realized that they’d found something important in each other. He doesn't know the details, because Ariadne doesn't talk about it, but he's made some assumptions. 

All he knows is that she likes to keep track of him in crowded rooms, so he makes sure that she can find him in a crowd. It's not hard - he knows he stands out, because he’s brown and bulky in the blandest Midwest, but he's careful to keep on the edges anyway. 

“Yusuf,” he hears from behind him, a friendly and jovial voice, lightly accented. 

“Oi,” he greets Eames in return. 

“Glad you could make it,” he says. 

“You know how it is,” Yusuf shrugs, meaning  _ someone has to drive Ariadne here _ . He’s not sure why Eames is making small talk with him. 

There had been a point, when Yusuf’s parents had just moved to the Midwest with a reluctant Yusuf in tow, that he'd assumed he and Eames would be friends. At the start of his sophomore year, he'd learned that he wasn't the only newly enrolled Brit, and he'd thought his friendship situation was settled. 

Somehow, it just never happened. He'd assumed they'd both be fish out of water, but he'd underestimated Eames, who was white and charmingly flippant and in short order had the entire school eating out of his hand. 

The only friend Yusuf had made that year was Ariadne. He'd got the better end of that deal, of course, but it’s moments like this when he’s acutely aware of the fact that he and Eames  _ could  _ have been friends, but they aren’t. 

Eames ducks his head a few times in awkward agreement. “Well, I just wanted to let you know, I don’t know if you keep Halal or not, but I’ve got some stuff hidden in the fridge just in case.”

He suddenly has Yusuf’s undivided attention. “What?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be offensive, or assume anything, but,” Eames says, tripping over himself. 

“No,” Yusuf assures him. “Of course not. It’s, it was thoughtful.”

He’s not sure why Eames looks so flustered, but Yusuf tries to reassure him, or, he means to. He’s not really sure how to put into words that his faith is a mess, half  _ cultural  _ and half  _ inertia,  _ but something catches his eye before he can make an attempt. “Hey, I’m sorry, I’ve got to — but I’ll catch you later!”

“No,” Ariadne says, when he is close enough to hear her. There are spots of color high on her cheeks. “We’re not in junior high.”

“Because friction stops being fun at fourteen?” the guy in front of her is saying. 

Yusuf steps up behind her, because he always does when Ariadne is radiating tension. She broadcasts it, like a high pitched noise, and he’d made his way over. He gets his suspicions confirmed when she melts back into him until he can feel the heat of her, the points of her spine and the clasp of her bra through the back of her shirt.

The boy talking to Ariadne, Yusuf knows he’s seen him around school, but he draws a blank on his name. Whoever he is, he isn’t pleased at Yusuf’s approach. 

“I know it's silly, but you know you can get people to do anything.”

“Patently false,” Ariadne snaps, getting back on her two feet now that he’s there, sturdy. For the most gregarious extrovert he knows, she gets so anxious when people disagree with her. “And why the hell would I want to do that?”

Yusuf is distinctly aware of the fact that there are people around the room who keep making discreet glances their way. He leans down, lips almost against her ear. “There are a lot of people looking your way, hoping you’ll agree to whatever this is.” 

She pulls back her shoulder to acknowledge him, a gentle, quick pressure against his chest. “You can play seven minutes or fucking spin the bottle for all I care,” she says, “but I’m not interested.”

“Why not?”

“You know I'm here with my boyfriend, Ruben,” she says. 

And then there is a beat, because Yusuf doesn’t know that this kid’s name is Ruben, not immediately. It takes a second to trickle in from his first interpretation, that Ariadne has a boyfriend (unlikely enough by itself) that Yusuf doesn’t know about (impossible) named Ruben. Instead, he realizes that she’s talking about him (Yusuf) to Ruben (the scrawny underclassman in front of them). Oh. 

Ariadne says a lot of shit, especially when she gets nervous and it’s like a switch gets jammed and stuck on “constant chatter.” Yusuf has enough experience not looking surprised, because to be honest, Ariadne’s a bit of a pathological liar. He hasn’t given up the game in years, not when she lies to her mother, or a teacher, or tells a story to a classmate that he knows isn't an accurate representation of true events. It's not malicious, she says. It's storytelling. For the most part, he agrees. 

This particular lie though almost breaks his composure, just by sheer force of his surprise. 

“No,” he says, eyes suddenly glittering with amusement, “I did not know that. But I don’t want to cause any trouble, so.” And then the rat bastard pitches his voice less for them and more for the rest of the room. “Yusuf and Ariadne are going to start us off.”

Yusuf is not proud to say that his first impulse is towards violence. He thinks,  _ if I hit him, we could be home by ten PM.  _

There’s a reason Ariadne used him as an excuse and that’s because she doesn’t want any part of whatever silly frictive game, not out of any sense of attraction. “No,” he says, ready to look like the stick in the mud. It’s not like he’s got popularity to lose.  

At the same time, Ariadne says, “Yeah, okay.”

*

He doesn’t get a chance to say  _ what the fuck, Ariadne _ , so Yusuf does his best to transmit it through his eyes as they get more or less shoved into the kitchen pantry. 

The pantry is very small. She is near enough that he can feel the gentle heat of her.

“Do you trust me,” she says against his neck. Her voice is so small, weightless. He wets his bottom lip with his tongue. 

“Of course,” he says, quiet, because it’s true, but he’s not particularly pleased with the question. It seems borderline manipulative to him that she’s allowed him to be shoved into this pantry like a bag of lentils with the express purpose of peer-induced intimate contact, and now she’s asked him if he  _ trusts her  _ like that’s what this is all about. 

“Okay,” she says. “Would you be comfortable with this, or would you prefer we just go out there and say, you know, thanks but no thanks?” 

Ariadne sounds unsure: not unheard of, but not something she directs at him, looking up at him, eyes wide in the dark. And she’s asking him, really asking him... It’s all he needed. He cups her face with his hands. “If this is what you want,” he says, pulse quickening in his chest. He can picture the chambers of his heart like a three dimensional model, gasping rhythmically. 

“I don’t want you to feel like I used you,” she says. 

“Use me,” he echoes, questioningly, but it comes out like an offer. 

It might as well be, he thinks, and leans in to touch her mouth with his own. He’s almost embarassed, briefly, because the kiss is everything people say about him: timid, unpassionate, awkward. He brushes his lips over hers, leaning down to do it because she’s small, so small, he’s a little afraid to touch her. “Alright?” he says. 

Ariadne brings her hand up to cover his, her palm warm on the back of his hand. “Yes,” she says. “Another?”

He is hardly in the habit of denying Ariadne what she wants. When he moves down to kiss her again, she shuffles in closer to him so that he can feel the weight of her as she leans into him, the toes of her shoes against his instep. The press of their mouthes is just a sweet the second time, and the awkwardness bleeds away. “Ariadne,” he says, against her lips. 

She lets out a little sigh. “Present.” she says. “Are you mad?” 

“No.” He’s not. Ariadne’s face is so small in his hands. And then he is slotted against her again. He has to curl down a little, and her free hand works inside his shirt, and he panics but it just sits there, unmistakably there but completely still and he relaxes.

He moves towards her in the dark, eyes adjusted to where he can finally get a good look at her. It doesn’t matter, she’s inimitable, he would know her anywhere. This time when their mothes meet, there is no fumble, just a sweet exchange. His heart stutters inside of his chest. 

He is close enough to hear her breathing, a little ragged when they part, before she pulls him back. He’s kissed girls before, and one boy, in the humiliating culmination of his first crush after moving to America, but it’s never been like this before. 

Of course it hasn’t: he’s never kissed Ariadne before. 

Of course, they’re going to walk out of this cramped pantry and Ariadne’s going to hand him his real life back, with his single primary friendship, and filling out a college application a week because his mum collects acceptance letters with unholy glee, and Ariadne will be back to the laughing presence at his side, amused at her own flippancy. 

It’s not like they’ve never been asked before, because people always want to know if they’re dating, the first time they go anywhere. “No,” she always says with sparkling eyes, inviting others to laugh at her private joke: “I keep trying, but he’s out of my leauge.” It’s convenient for her because she doesn’t like dating, and she probably thinks she’s doing him a favor, like she’s talking him up. The whole thing makes his skin crawl. 

He’s not sure what happened tonight except that Ariadne felt threatened and retreated to where she knew she’d be safe. He doesn’t — it’s not like he minds, like it’s a hardship, being the safe haven of the most interesting person he knows. He likes being a safe harbor for her. 

“Uh oh,” Ariadne whispers, palming his hand. “Why are you sad? Did I … I’m really sorry. Shit, Yusuf.”

“I’m not,” he says, but his voice scrapes the ground. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” she says, so quiet, like she thinks someone might be listening from the kitchen. “You’re upset, and it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have done it like that. It’s just that I had to know.”

“What,” he croaks, knocked off balance literally and figuratively by what she’s just said and the way she’s pressed in close against him. She steadies him by grabbing his shirt. 

“I just had to know if it was ever going to happen,” Ariadne says. 

“Do you  _ want  _ it to happen?” 

“Well. I only state my intentions  _ most days  _ and spend every waking moment chasing you and I brush my hair  _ every day  _ in an attempt to get your attention.” Ariadne says, like everything is just so obvious. Yusuf feels a bit like he’s driven into a lake and he’s not sure how he got there, or how he’s supposed to get his seatbelt off, in terms of quantifiable shock. 

“I thought I was just ... safe.” The safe option, to keep him around with his bulky arms and willingness to play the stick in the mud when she wants to say no, but still wants to be the darling of the student body. Convenient.

“Of course you are. Who doesn't like feeling safe? But that's hardly all you're good for. I didn't do a lot of scheming for you to protect me from douche bags. You do that already.” 

It is very quiet, and very dark. Seconds tick by. _In that case_. 

“You have my attention,” he says, after a blank moment before what she’s saying to him sinks in. “You usually do.”

“Good,” she says, and he can hear her smile. “Because I bet we’ve still got another three minutes on the clock.” 

**Author's Note:**

> So I was trying to get started on the zany HS AU I'll hopefully eventually be working on where Ariadne and Yusuf are a fake couple but they only love each other platonically, but this turned into something else, and I figured I might as well post it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] start the clock](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7423234) by [flosculatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flosculatory/pseuds/flosculatory)




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